With the initial drawing established, the tones are blocked in with a wash of thin blue oil. I chose to start off with a cold underpainting because I wanted the blues in the finished painting to have real luminosity and starting with warm shadows as I usually do would have worked against this, even at this stage.

After the first underpainting had dried I kept building up the image with thin body colour to introduce the basic colour structure. During this process I was able to paint out figures and introduce others fairly easily as the canvas was not clogged up with too much paint and it was still a matt surface which still allowed subsequent pencil drawing to “take”.

Too much committment at this stage in a painting is fatal for me. I need to keep all options open, in order to respond to the work as it develops.

I had real trouble with all the figures I tried in the left of the painting. Some didn’t work because the drawing was bad but all of them distracted from the main thrust of the composition which was the grouping from the statue towards the right..

I wasn’t having a problem with the main figures though, and the ideas I had to develop the colour were really exciting. All the time I was flogging away at the figures I was planning a real blitz on the finished tones and colour to make them really strong and intense.

By this time I was getting really hacked off with the figure on the left. Not content with being badly drawn it’s started to look like a stalker or some monster from a horror film.

The rest of the work I’m excited with, the colour is going to plan, the other figures likewise but this left corner of the painting is abominable. I’m starting to think that the reason it doesn’t work with “things” in it is because it really needs to be a blank area to balance the tight grouping on centre right.

It’s always tempting to follow the school rules of composition and go for a placid circular, “balanced” arrangement. All I can say is that it never works for me.

It’s boring.

Much better now for losing the stalker, but now the blank space looks really dull and lacklustre. I’m hoping I can get this back with stronger colour and a minimum of detail, otherwise it’ll be back to square one.

I decided to stick with this approach and after painting in the figures, I worked over the whole surface with alternate layers of body colour and transparent glazes to intensify the colour and tone. I’ve always got more trust in developing open spaces in a painting than in filling it with unnecessary detail

Here’s a picture of my rabbit to cheer you up.

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